A Mobile Agent Approach for Flexible Peer-to-Peer File Retrieval

Peer-to-peer (P2P) data sharing is one of valuable approaches for sharing data among people when they are belonging to different institutions. There are strong demands on both flexible, high-precision search and protection of privacy at peer-to-peer data retrievals. Especially, it is demanded for searching relevant files in P2P environment by using metadata while the terms in metadata that are used in such queries and annotations include some private information. In this paper, I present my current ongoing work on P2P-based semantic file sharing and retrieval mechanism that enables us to use private ontologies for flexible concept-oriented semantic searches without loss of privacy in processing semantic matchings among private metadata of files and the requested semantic queries. The private ontologies are formed on a certain reference ontology with differential ontologies for personalization. In our approach, users can manage and annotate their files with their own private ontologies. Reference ontologies are used to find out semantically relevant files for the given queries that include semantic relations among existing files and the requested files. Mobile agent approach is applied for the purpose to implement a system with less use of network bandwidth and also to code it into simple programs. A prototype system is implemented on the MiLog mobile agent programming platform. Discussions about potential advantages and issues on the approach are presented based on the prototype implementation.